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Catalyst : Loud fans on a 6370M laptop even while using xvba acceleration

Catalyst : Loud fans on a 6370M laptop even while using xvba acceleration

02-15-2013, 11:35 AM

Hi

I encounter very loud fans even playing simple 480p videos on fglrx...I have enabled xvba and have double checked the status in VLC and Mplayer-Vaapi builds.
Also XBMC-xvba branch doesnt seem to help much . This is the only major issue I am stumbling and makes me go back to Windows (quiet even when playing full 1080p) just for the sake of playing videos without my laptop sounding like a jet engine...

I have double checked CPU utilization in top which shows around 15-10% cpu usage for VLC and Mplayer even XBMC cpu utilization is low.. but just cant figure out why do fans choke out while playing videos...

all this on my AMD Radeon 6370M on a HP G42-478TX laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 and fglrx 13.1 with Linux 3.7.6

Comment

Maybe you could try "messing" with the acpi_osi kernel parameter and see if it helps. I use acpi_osi="Linux" because the fans seemed to work more than needed and it seems much better afterward.
Can't guarantee it will be the solution of course.
More info here[clicky].

Comment

Well thats a bit high CPU temp. The fans are doing their job it seems.
Whats the output of

Code:

aticonfig --od-gettemp

Dont hold your breath on this one, it might give erroneous results (i have -5 C on my AMD Radeon HD 7560D/A8-5500 at ~21 C room temp). But maybe it will work given that you have a dedicated card.

PS. Laptops+Dedicated cards = always higher temperatures because the cooling system has to cope not only with the CPU but also with the dedicated card. The fan speeds are regulated by both mobo/CPU and GPU temperatures, so any of them overheat, the system will spin them up.

Comment

Well thats a bit high CPU temp. The fans are doing their job it seems.
Whats the output of

Code:

aticonfig --od-gettemp

Dont hold your breath on this one, it might give erroneous results (i have -5 C on my AMD Radeon HD 7560D/A8-5500 at ~21 C room temp). But maybe it will work given that you have a dedicated card.

PS. Laptops+Dedicated cards = always higher temperatures because the cooling system has to cope not only with the CPU but also with the dedicated card. The fan speeds are regulated by both mobo/CPU and GPU temperatures, so any of them overheat, the system will spin them up.

also here is my top screenshot, while playing a 720p .mp4 file in mplayer-vaapi everything looks fine.. like I said in the question, the fan noise arises ONLY during video playback despite the low CPU usage :-/ I know really this is weird.. please give some pointers towards fixing this issue